kata 🌊 aqua!

i just remembered one time in the 2000s when some pop culture website i read was like "watch this Batman fan film. trust us" and there was a hyperlink to a file download for what i believe was a QuickTime mov, which for you post-youtube readers was basically the highest quality video you could get back then that wasn't also super huge in terms of file size, but also, it was still very huge in file size compared to anything that was usually way smaller and looked way shittier. anyway the point is i guess i trusted these writers or was intrigued enough by the mystery that i downloaded the file, which took maybe something like an hour even on my DSL connection, and then settled in to watch. lo and behold, it's a 10-minute live action short, admittedly very slickly produced, about Batman fighting the fucking Predator, a premise i find so bafflingly pointless to consider that i think then and there i turned against the nerd industrial complex for the rest of my days

i remember when Sonic X came out i tied up the phone line for a full 24 hours to torrent the first fansubbed episode (which was like ~300MB)

In the late 90s, I discovered emulators, and most of the time I was downloading SNES or Genesis ROMs which mostly only took a few minutes even on dialup. But I did at one point download Ocarina of Time, which took, I dunno, 8 hours? 10? Something like that. It took all night, and when it finally finished, I discovered that it was broken up into pieces and compressed using software that did not have an iMac compatible equivalent, so I couldn't even play it. I don't know if that's the longest I ever tied up a landline, but it was definitely the worst time-to-payoff ratio

this is a tangent but i'm reminded of the time i bought the Everquest Complete Collection (base game and all expansions) for like $5 on clearance at Target

i got through maybe one or two of the ~5 install CDs it came with before i was informed that my Gateway laptop's 5GB hard drive was too full to go on

I set up a download of Phantom Menace on my home computer's 28.8 modem. It would get disconnected, so I had it redial automatically if so. However, to restart the download I had to use a dynamic DNS that would map my current IP onto a fixed URL, so I could connect over a remote desktop and click the download link again (I think this was FTP, or maybe early filesharing - before Napster, though).

So every few hours I would check in on my download, and I think it took three full days to complete. All that for The Phantom Menace.

i started warez-ing with my dial up modem in college in the late 90s specifically to get super expensive 3D programs like 3DS MAX and Maya, so that i could do my schoolwork on my home machine instead of having to wait for my turn on a workstation at the computer lab. while i was on those FTP sites i saw some recent game releases, Unreal and the Half-Life: Day One¹ demo. they were a few hundred MB each and took days to download, but i wasn't using my landline for anything else.

playing both of those games reinvigorated my interest in level design (i was then studying to be an animator) and since they both had level editors available, i started dabbling. a year and a half later i had a job in the games industry. (and i didn't need to pirate games after that, haha)

so the hilarious What If is, what if i hadn't been willing to put up with the hassle of pirating those massive games over a crappy dial up connection? who knows, man, who knows!

1. basically the full game, up until the end of the "Surface Tension" chapter.

I was probably 11, I only had the demo of Max Payne, and a guy I knew off a forum for a Half-Life mod agreed to try zipping up his Max Payne folder and sending it to me through MSN. It took days and I was sure it wasn't going to work. At one point, he went offline for a couple days, but MSN at that time was so stupid (ly excellent) that it never stopped retrying, and when he came back online it resumed. I don't know how long it took but it worked, and until a recent hard drive fault that was the version of MP1 I was rolling with.

Thanks LoneDeinonoychus!

It's moderately likely I was still on dial-up when Half-Life 2 came out, so we're looking at probably close to a week of downloading that.

But that was also back in the days where Steam operated differently than it does now. Nowadays Steam just downloads all the raw, uncompressed files, but I want to say Half-Life 2 might have come in some kind of highly-compressed package file that had to be decompressed on the user's system after it finished downloading.

So it may have actually been less than a week, but probably not much.

and when i finally got to watch it, it was a Real file, so of course it looked like Ass, but god damn if i wasn’t excited

this was 1998